Perlin. He walks me to a decrepit building off
Broadway on 94th Street.
"More than 100,000 SRO units have been
lost since the early seventies," he says. "We
have fewer than 50,000 left. They are the
last housing resource for low-income individ
uals. At least a third of the single people
in homeless shelters came
from SROs. They are usually
people who don't know their
rights, who don't have family
or friends. They have had
rough lives."
As we enter the building,
the desk clerk is screaming
curses at a resident. Reluc
tantly she lets us go upstairs.
Perlin knows his rights. A
policeman sits outside the
five-room subdivided apart
ment where Vashti lives. One
of the tenants just died; he had
fallen and struck his head on a
radiator. He is being put in a
body bag. We knock on the
door of the room where Vashti
has lived for 30 years. She is
lying on a sheetless bed with a
roommate, James Downey,
watching TV.
She pats the bed, smiles,
and offers us juice from an
old refrigerator. The room is
about 8 feet by 12. Its condi
tion is deplorable. The rent,
says Vashti, who panhandles
on Broadway, is $213.62
a month.
We inspect repairs the land
lord recently made. The new
vinyl flooring was sloppily
installed. The walls were not
painted behind the bed. Some
of the other tenants had been
withholding rents, and a court
had ordered the landlord to
make repairs before he could
collect or evict.
"He told me today to pay up or get out,"
says Vashti.
"Don't you pay him anything," Perlin
counsels her.
"I always pay my rent," she continues.
"That way he's OK with you. I have nowhere
to go. Sure you don't want some juice?"
The police walk by with the body bag.
"Mr. Foster hit his head and died," she
explains.
"Is the bathroom fixed?" asks Perlin.
"It's still locked," says Downey.
"Has
been for nearly a week."
He gets up,
explaining that he limps due to a botched brain
"The finest free show on earth" or "an angry carbuncle"
on the face of the city? Both descriptions of Broad
way from the early 20th century fit today's reactions
to Times Square, where a portrait artist works the
street. Architectural renewal threatened to erase the
area's bright lights until a public outcry mandated
neon and flashing signs on new buildings.
Broadway, Street of Dreams